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Giant Bomb Thread #5 - We love you, Ryan Davis

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You know... the thing about PAX Australia is that Australia is not far from Japan. Maybe leave for PAX a few days early, quick stop over in Japan, raid some used game shops, bada bing, bada boom.

I dunno man, Tokyo to Melbourne is the same distance as Tokyo to LA, 5,000 miles.

edit : Beaten...
 
Wow, GiantBomb it finally happened. You have a full screen blaster ad on your website. Sure, its for Arrested Development but man, I remember Jeff HATING full screen (press X to close in corner appears after 5 seconds).

Still waiting for another subscription sale again.
 
Wow, GiantBomb it finally happened. You have a full screen blaster ad on your website. Sure, its for Arrested Development but man, I remember Jeff HATING full screen (press X to close in corner appears after 5 seconds).

Still waiting for another subscription sale again.

screenshot?
 
Wow, GiantBomb it finally happened. You have a full screen blaster ad on your website. Sure, its for Arrested Development but man, I remember Jeff HATING full screen (press X to close in corner appears after 5 seconds).

Still waiting for another subscription sale again.

He still does - it's just not his site anymore. Not his call to make. He said something about that in one Jartime.

(Which makes me think how much money they got from the sale, as, if I remember correctly, they all had some sort of part of the company).
 
Wow, GiantBomb it finally happened. You have a full screen blaster ad on your website. Sure, its for Arrested Development but man, I remember Jeff HATING full screen (press X to close in corner appears after 5 seconds).

Still waiting for another subscription sale again.

Man, that ad is obnoxious
 
He still does - it's just not his site anymore. Not his call to make. He said something about that in one Jartime.

(Which makes me think how much money they got from the sale, as, if I remember correctly, they all had some sort of part of the company).

Like Ryan, I am also interested in the logistics of these things. Doubt they will ever tell us though.

From what I heard, CBS (or was it just Gamespot?) bought Giantbomb for their wiki technology, but I've yet to see it used anywhere else.
 
I'm premium so I don't get the ads but I had to take a look. Annoying as shit but Jeffrey Tambor and that ice cream sandwich gave me a good laugh.
 
Ok, I went into incognito and took my own screenshot of it. To get the full picture, I took a gif!

Click here for 12mb gif

That is really terrible.

They bought them for the subscribers. They don't even run on python anymore (Whiskey tech)

You mean move Giantbomb subscribers over to the Gamespot platform? That seems odd, considering the reason people (or at least I) go to Giantbomb is because they're different to other video game websites.
 
jesus christ why would anyone ever not use an adblocker (i'm a subscriber for the record)

My subscription ran out during x-mas. I was waiting for a winter (than spring) sale. I just find it weird that Jeff of all people allow this (UNLESS he is a huge Arrested Development fan).

Adblock is bad for content producers (a ton of my bay area friends depend on that type of revenue) so I don't use it out of principle. I end up not watching content with invasive ads.
 
It's important because it's DF and because of their history with Kickstarter. It's silly to seriously call this story a "promotion"


You couldn't possibly be so naive as to believe that. The story has a picture of Muir (how many other stories show the producter involved and not the product, or even a company logo*), mentions him multiple times and references his appearances on Giant Bomb, and is the only Kickstarter story that they've run in a year. If they were actually interested in doing stories on notable Kickstarters, the Rift (a hugely successful Kickstarter project showing off interesting new applications of technology in games) or Torment (more successful than any other Kickstarter game and also the second Kickstarter launched by one of the companies with early success) would have gotten a story too. There is no way this story runs if it isn't Doublefine and Brad Muir, regardless of who had the first big Kickstarter.


*On the front page link. The articles themselves pretty regularly show the person involved


I'm glad the Kickstarter is successful and look forward to playing the game, but to pretend it is being covered in this high profile a manner on Giant Bomb for any reason other than the guy running it is ridiculous.
 
Honest question, if you're browsing a site for say 10, 15 or 30 minutes; is a 10 second ad really that bad?

Maybe I'm bias, but if you compare it to TV or radio where you can be interrupted for 3-5 minutes for every 15 minutes of viewed content (and sometimes still have to pay), the trade-off seems much more in favour of the viewer.

And at least it's a high quality ad for a legit service and not something shady.
 
Honest question, if you're browsing a site for say 10, 15 or 30 minutes; is a 10 second ad really that bad?

Maybe I'm bias, but if you compare it to TV or radio where you can be interrupted for 3-5 minutes for every 15 minutes of viewed content (and sometimes still have to pay), the trade-off seems much more in favour of the viewer.

And at least it's a high quality ad for a legit service and not something shady.

I don't watch TV partially because of ads. 9 minutes out of every 30 is a lot of ads. I'm fine with ads on the side or a block near the top, but it must never get in the way. No pop-ups, no auto-expand, no auto-play especially with sound. I don't really use Adblock anymore, if a site pisses me off enough then I'm not even gonna block the ads, I'm just gonna never visit the site ever again. Much more effective.
 
You couldn't possibly be so naive as to believe that. The story has a picture of Muir (how many other stories show the producter involved and not the product, or even a company logo*), mentions him multiple times and references his appearances on Giant Bomb, and is the only Kickstarter story that they've run in a year. If they were actually interested in doing stories on notable Kickstarters, the Rift (a hugely successful Kickstarter project showing off interesting new applications of technology in games) or Torment (more successful than any other Kickstarter game and also the second Kickstarter launched by one of the companies with early success) would have gotten a story too. There is no way this story runs if it isn't Doublefine and Brad Muir, regardless of who had the first big Kickstarter.


*On the front page link. The articles themselves pretty regularly show the person involved


I'm glad the Kickstarter is successful and look forward to playing the game, but to pretend it is being covered in this high profile a manner on Giant Bomb for any reason other than the guy running it is ridiculous.
To be fair the whole pitch video is based around Brad
 
Like Ryan, I am also interested in the logistics of these things. Doubt they will ever tell us though.

From what I heard, CBS (or was it just Gamespot?) bought Giantbomb for their wiki technology, but I've yet to see it used anywhere else.

They definitely didn't buy them for the tech. All the Website technology went with the other side of the company. CBS simply bought the two most popular sites at Whiskey and their visitors.

At one point I swear that Jeff implied that Comic Vine and Giant Bomb had basically been keeping Whiskey afloat.
 
They bought them for the subscribers. They don't even run on python anymore (Whiskey tech)

We weren't allowed to build on python due to the sales contract. Otherwise, the backend would have been a different technology.

The wiki tech is going to be used moving forward tho. It's a interesting graph setup that we're continuing to innovate on and hopefully show more of its abilities (and enhance CV and GB even more).
 
They definitely didn't buy them for the tech. All the Website technology went with the other side of the company. CBS simply bought the two most popular sites at Whiskey and their visitors.

At one point I swear that Jeff implied that Comic Vine and Giant Bomb had basically been keeping Whiskey afloat.

Wow really? I'm not into comics but that's nice to hear.

And now that skeleton king got another active ability...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRgEEVK04wA
 
At one point I swear that Jeff implied that Comic Vine and Giant Bomb had basically been keeping Whiskey afloat.

Yes. Somebody asked them something along the lines of "since you guys were having problems before, how are you guys managing to stay alive now, since pretty much nothing changed since the acquisition?" and Jeff basically said "Well, we're only two sites now, and we are the sites that make money, so it's much easier to keep everything working".

Anime Vice and Tested were probably killing them on Whiskey times. GiantBomb was always the front facing website of that company, but Comic Vine has a huge Comic following (that we know nothing about, because we're not Comic guys). Comic Vine was a Whiskey Joint even before Giantbomb.

I'm guessing that Comic Vine managed to keep itself together with ads and content, while Giantbomb was getting by with User Subscriptions. Tested and Anime Vice were just tagging along barely making any money.

So, the tech behind all the sites ("Distillery", Whiskey Media's behind the scene website management tool), Tested and Anime Vice went the BermanBraun way, while Giantbomb, ComicVine and the Wiki content (Videogame and Comics Databases), along with it's paying users, went the CBSi way.
 
Honest question, if you're browsing a site for say 10, 15 or 30 minutes; is a 10 second ad really that bad?

Maybe I'm bias, but if you compare it to TV or radio where you can be interrupted for 3-5 minutes for every 15 minutes of viewed content (and sometimes still have to pay), the trade-off seems much more in favour of the viewer.

And at least it's a high quality ad for a legit service and not something shady.

Just wait till your loading screens in games have blaster ads where you shoot to close. Again, its the fact that Jeff had the same stance as I did with these types of ads. I was stating the fact that Jeff allowed this to happen.


EDIT; Also, watching Jeff eat an ice cream sandwich watching AD would have been much funnier.
 
Yes. Somebody asked them something along the lines of "since you guys were having problems before, how are you guys managing to stay alive now, since pretty much nothing changed since the acquisition?" and Jeff basically said "Well, we're only two sites now, and we are the sites that make money, so it's much easier to keep everything working".

Anime Vice and Tested were probably killing them on Whiskey times. GiantBomb was always the front facing website of that company, but Comic Vine has a huge Comic following (that we know nothing about, because we're not Comic guys). Comic Vine was a Whiskey Joint even before Giantbomb.

I'm guessing that Comic Vine managed to keep itself together with ads and content, while Giantbomb was getting by with User Subscriptions. Tested and Anime Vice were just tagging along barely making any money.

So, the tech behind all the sites ("Distillery", Whiskey Media's behind the scene website management tool), Tested and Anime Vice went the BermanBraun way, while Giantbomb, ComicVine and the Wiki content (Videogame and Comics Databases), along with it's paying users, went the CBSi way.

You forgot Screened, which I have a feeling was the biggest money drain of them all.
 
You forgot Screened, which I have a feeling was the biggest money drain of them all.

I did, didn't I? :D

I don't even know where Screened went. According to their website, it's part of the Mandatory Network, which is part of Berman Braun.

Nobody ever talks about Anime Vice, but it still exists, it still gets updated and it's still running on old Whiskey tech. It's also part of the Mandatory network.

I guess both sites are freelance material now, and just bullet points on a corporation portfolio.
 
I did, didn't I? :D

I don't even know where Screened went. According to their website, it's part of the Mandatory Network, which is part of Berman Braun.

Nobody ever talks about Anime Vice, but it still exists, it still gets updated and it's still running on old Whiskey tech. It's also part of the Mandatory network.

I guess both sites are freelance material now, and just bullet points on a corporation portfolio.

Anime Vice is the weirdest case, because if you recall even Whiskey got rid of pretty much all the editors of the site and the fans kept it updated. It's practically self-running.
 
We weren't allowed to build on python due to the sales contract. Otherwise, the backend would have been a different technology.

The wiki tech is going to be used moving forward tho. It's a interesting graph setup that we're continuing to innovate on and hopefully show more of its abilities (and enhance CV and GB even more).
Not sure if you're able to talk about this, but when a company has multiple products all centred around a common denominator (e.g. GameSpot, Gamefaqs, GiantBomb), isn't it weird having multiple autonomous backends powering each? Like, if you have a database of almost every game ever made, including all the different SKU's it appeared under, as well as the artwork, wouldn't it make sense to have that shared amongst the entire network? It's not editorial or personality-based content, so it can't really damage the sites from a branding perspective.

I know nothing about building massive databases, so I'm probably talking completely out of my arse, but it just seems a waste not to centralise certain factual data.
 
Not sure if you're able to talk about this, but when a company has multiple products all centred around a common denominator (e.g. GameSpot, Gamefaqs, GiantBomb), isn't it weird having multiple autonomous backends powering each? Like, if you have a database of almost every game ever made, including all the different SKU's it appeared under, as well as the artwork, wouldn't it make sense to have that shared amongst the entire network? It's not editorial or personality-based content, so it can't really damage the sites from a branding perspective.

I know nothing about building massive databases, so I'm probably talking completely out of my arse, but it just seems a waste not to centralise certain factual data.

We're doing a rebuild of the other brands right now on the foundation that we've built for the current Giant Bomb / Comic Vine. There will definitely be a cross-polination of information (release data, faqs, sku's, box-art etc) but we also need to make sure that each brand's individuality (Wiki for Giant Bomb, FAQs for GameFAQs) doesn't get diminished and they keep their charm for their specific user bases.

Regardless, we built the foundation moving forward (you can see the system name in some of Dave's shown'tell videos earlier this year) to support all the brands and so they can share or cherry-pick (depending on the brand and their editor's needs) data back and forth.
 
We're doing a rebuild of the other brands right now on the foundation that we've built for the current Giant Bomb / Comic Vine. There will definitely be a cross-polination of information (release data, faqs, sku's, box-art etc) but we also need to make sure that each brand's individuality (Wiki for Giant Bomb, FAQs for GameFAQs) doesn't get diminished and they keep their charm for their specific user bases.

Regardless, we built the foundation moving forward (you can see the system name in some of Dave's shown'tell videos earlier this year) to support all the brands and so they can share or cherry-pick (depending on the brand and their editor's needs) data back and forth.
That makes sense. Really interested to see what the Gamespot rebuild looks like. Hopefully it's far more video focused, because just by looking at the current homepage I'd never have known they do so many different live streams and features if I hadn't been randomly checking out Danny O'Dwyer's twitter after Backflips 'n Bioforge.

I like to hope one day all sites with good, frequent video content will have a page that just looks like a giant, well designed DVR interface. Show what's coming up, archives of what you missed, indicators of how much you viewed for each video so you can resume, queuing etc.
 
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